CSBAs I recall, even by the online standards of the time, there was nothing to do. I remember I did try to order something from CompWarehouse online, and it only took an extra 3 days for the order to get placed. The reason? Prodigy would put all the days orders on tape, then FedEx the tape to CompWarehouse, who would then fill the order./CSB

I started with some half-assery thing called "PC-Link" on craptastic Tandy laptop (apparently 8086) which I later found out was the DOS gui for what later became AOL. I briefly flirted with Prodigy but Compuserve had the Movies board with Roger Ebert who actually responded to postings now and again. After discovering a local BBS and getting a shell account on some university dialups, I really never wanted to bother with the mainsteam services again. Though I hammered to try and get and account on The Well, just as it was closing up shop, I suspect.

I never could see why Compuserve used a comma in its userid schema. It distinctly annoys me to this day.

I recall playing some rpg game on prodigy that involved going through a maze and the baba yaga was there and also there was a minotaur that asked a math question and if I answered wrong it wouldn't let me pass and hurled me away.

corq:I started with some half-assery thing called "PC-Link" on craptastic Tandy laptop (apparently 8086) which I later found out was the DOS gui for what later became AOL. I briefly flirted with Prodigy but Compuserve had the Movies board with Roger Ebert who actually responded to postings now and again. After discovering a local BBS and getting a shell account on some university dialups, I really never wanted to bother with the mainsteam services again. Though I hammered to try and get and account on The Well, just as it was closing up shop, I suspect.

I never could see why Compuserve used a comma in its userid schema. It distinctly annoys me to this day.

YRPD43C. Wow, that was my prodigy login. Can't believe I still remember that. though, I do remember I spent $300 in one month as a 16 year old talking to chicks through e-mail (which you had to pay for each one back then), which caused me to get my first real job to pay my parents back...

ThatBillmanGuy:YRPD43C. Wow, that was my prodigy login. Can't believe I still remember that. though, I do remember I spent $300 in one month as a 16 year old talking to chicks through e-mail (which you had to pay for each one back then), which caused me to get my first real job to pay my parents back...

ThatBillmanGuy:YRPD43C. Wow, that was my prodigy login. Can't believe I still remember that. though, I do remember I spent $300 in one month as a 16 year old talking to chicks through e-mail (which you had to pay for each one back then), which caused me to get my first real job to pay my parents back...

Same here but I was younger and it was civilization forums. My dad was able to argue away the bill over the phone thankfully so I didn't get into too much trouble.

You know, I was ready to come in and be snarky about it, but I was actually quite impressed with how ahead of the times that was. I was all of six when that commercial came out, and I don't remember actually getting on the internet until 1993, but that ad had pretty much everything that my grandparents and country-dwellin' relatives use today.

jimmiejaz:corq: I started with some half-assery thing called "PC-Link" on craptastic Tandy laptop (apparently 8086) which I later found out was the DOS gui for what later became AOL. I briefly flirted with Prodigy but Compuserve had the Movies board with Roger Ebert who actually responded to postings now and again. After discovering a local BBS and getting a shell account on some university dialups, I really never wanted to bother with the mainsteam services again. Though I hammered to try and get and account on The Well, just as it was closing up shop, I suspect.

I never could see why Compuserve used a comma in its userid schema. It distinctly annoys me to this day.

It's still around: http://www.well.com/

The Well was that place where you couldn't be anonymous and you had to be a certain income level to join. Or, at least it seemed that way. There were no poors at the Well. Lot of upper class libs and artists, though.

My family tried out Compu$erve and Prodigy$, but my first real-ish Internet connection was free free free. First, I had a free account on a local multi-line dialup BBS which would periodically connect to the Internet to synch up Usenet groups and Internet email (UUCP gateway). But other than that, I had no access to the WWW or the Internet at large.

Second, the University had a free local dialup number to connect to their Gopher pages, and it had no time limit. Like WWW without graphics. But you weren't able to go directly to any pages in Gopherspace; you had to follow links from page to page. Luckily, I found a convoluted path to what passed for search engines in those days; called Archie, Veronica and Jughead. With these, I could search for an unrestricted Telnet gateway. This was a magic Gopher link that let me escape the pages and appear to be dialed into a remote command line interface. The gateways that I could find would do little more than let me search for documents or join mainframe BBS systems. However, several permitted me to telnet on to other systems. There was an outfit I could Telnet to called cyberspace.com that let anyone sign up for a free 1-mo shell account, which I did over and over. One of the services available was Lynx, so, that got me on the web!

Whenever I wanted to forward documents or software to my 1MB 80286 home PC, I downloaded it to my shell account, then fired up Pine and emailed it to myself at the local BBS. The local BBS had Zmodem for downloading. I used virtually every terminal emulator/dialup number manager that ever came out, but the very best was called Telix 3.22. Every other emulator had several facepalmingly bad flaws, but the Telix people finally did everything just right. I leeched off of the University's dial-in for several years, but I only used Telix for a couple of months because, naturally, that was right when the BBS scene died overnight as cablemodem service became available.

I used it at my friends house to look up Sega cheat codes. The blood code for mortal combat and the fatalities. I thought it was the most amazing thing ever and tried to get my folks to get it but they didn't see what the big deal was. I also remember playing this paintball type game through Prodigy, I think it was called splatterball.

Gergesa:I recall playing some rpg game on prodigy that involved going through a maze and the baba yaga was there and also there was a minotaur that asked a math question and if I answered wrong it wouldn't let me pass and hurled me away.

Man I think I recall 8 megabytes of ram was a lot then.

I remember when memory got down to £10 per megabyte second hand. My current system ram would cost £240,000 at those prices...